by Fabian Lim

A navigation menu is an important element of a website.

A good navigation menu helps your visitors navigate through your website efficiently - in as few mouse-clicks as possible.

You can think of a website navigation menu like the "Table of Contents" of a book.

And the greater the number of web pages on your website, the more important the role of a website navigation menu.

Another important benefit of a navigation menu is it optimizes the internal linking structure of your website and allows the navigation menu links to rank better in search engines, since all web pages will be pointing to it.

(For example, if your website has 1000 web pages, each navigation menu link will have 1000 web pages pointing to it. This will result in the navigation menu links ranking higher than the other web pages)

Here's how you can use this knowledge to improve the search-engine rankings of selected web pages - Simply include the selected web pages as links in the navigation menu and you'll automatically have the rest of the web pages pointing to them.

And finally, here's one method you can use to easily create a website navigation menu - Using Server Side Includes (SSI).

What are Server Side Includes?

Server Side Includes (SSI) are simply instructions (also known as "directives") that are included in a HTML document to execute a specific command e.g. inserting the content of an HTML file.

The SSI directives are "processed" at the Server side, before it reaches the requesting browser (hence the name Server Side Includes).

As a result, the "processed" SSI directives merge seamlessly with the HTML file...